Questions, answered plainly

From 30 December 2026 for large and medium operators and traders, and for micro and small operators in the timber sector who were previously covered by the EU Timber Regulation.

From 30 June 2027 for micro and small operators outside timber, and for natural persons. The Commission has said it does not intend to postpone again.

It depends where you sit. Operators placing relevant products on the EU market for the first time, or exporting from it, submit statements.

If you buy products another operator has already placed on the market, the 2025 revision means you collect and retain their reference numbers rather than filing your own. Non-SME downstream operators and traders still register in the Information System. Confirm your own position with your legal advisers, because it is a determination about your business rather than a setting in a tool.

Seven commodities: cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soya and wood, plus a list of products derived from them set out in Annex I by customs code.

The derived products list has already been amended once and a further draft delegated act was published for feedback in May 2026. We deliberately do not publish a code list here, because a snapshot of a moving target is worse than none. Take it from the consolidated text on EUR-Lex.

The location of the plots of land where the commodity was produced. In practice that means either a point or a boundary, depending on the plot.

The difficulty is almost never willingness. It is that files arrive with reversed coordinates, unclosed boundaries or shapes that cross themselves. Catching those at the moment of upload, and explaining them in the supplier language, is what stops a fortnight disappearing.

No, and be wary of anyone who implies it does. Software can tell you what evidence you hold, what is missing, who owes it and what your own assessment concluded. Responsibility for compliance rests with the operator.

The same applies to geolocation checking. Confirming a file can be read is not the same as confirming the land is deforestation free. Those are different questions answered by different means.

This is a commercial problem before it is a compliance one, and it is the reason automated chasing matters. A consistent ladder of reminders, followed by internal escalation to a named person, resolves most of it.

What is left is a decision for your business about whether to keep buying from a supplier who cannot evidence origin. Software makes that decision visible and evidenced. It does not make it for you.

For a first pass, yes, and we would encourage it. A spreadsheet forces you to work out what you need to track before spending money.

It stops working when two people edit it in the same week, when you need to explain why a product was classified as it was, and when chasing becomes somebody second job. The test we suggest: pick one purchase order and time how long it takes to say with evidence whether it can proceed.

Getting data in and seeing your first readiness picture is a matter of days, not months, because it starts from exports you already have.

The long pole is supplier response, and that is outside anyone software. If you have a hundred suppliers to reach, plan in months rather than weeks and start before you have chosen a tool.

No. Purchasing stays where it is. Data comes in by file or connector and status is exposed back. We are deliberately the layer between your systems and the evidence, not a replacement for them.

Product scope, country risk and effective dates are versioned reference data rather than code. When the Annex is amended you load a new version and re-evaluate, and previous decisions stay intact with the version that produced them recorded.

That matters more than it sounds. An auditor asking why something was classified a certain way in August needs an answer that is still true, not today answer applied retrospectively.

Separation is enforced at the database row level rather than in application code, so a mistake in a screen cannot expose another company records. Supplier links are scoped to a single request and expire.

Pricing depends on the number of suppliers you need to reach, which is the real driver of both value and load. Tell us roughly how many and we will give you a straight number in the first conversation.